The Brimming Cup Part 38

She ran down the path and around the house to the road, not feeling the blinding heat of the sun. She ran along the dusty road, a few steps from the house before the turn into the narrow lane. She felt nothing at all but a great need for haste.

As she ran, putting all her strength into her running, there were moments when she forgot why she was hurrying, where she was going, what had happened; but she did not slacken her pace. She was on the narrow back road now, in the dense shade of the pines below the Eagle Rocks. In five minutes she would be at Cousin Hetty's. That was where she was going.

She was running more slowly now over the rough, uneven, stony road, and she was aware, more than of anything else, of a pain in her chest where she could not draw a long breath. It seemed to her that she must be now wholly in the bad dream, for she had the nightmare sensation of running with all her strength and not advancing at all. The somber, thick-set pines seemed to be implacably in the same place, no matter how she tried to pa.s.s them, to leave them behind, to hurry on. Everything else in the silent, breathless, midsummer forest was rooted immovably deep in the earth. She alone was killing herself with haste, and yet futilely ...

not able to get forward, not able to ...

And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and showed her another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right, running down the steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks. A man running as she had been wis.h.i.+ng she could run, a powerful, roughly dressed man, rapt in a pa.s.sion of headlong flight, that cast him down the rough slope, over the rocks, through the brambles, as though his flight were part of an endless fall.

Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but the age-old woman's instinct of fear and concealment.

The man plunged forward, not seeing her where she stood on the road across which he now burst, flinging himself out of the pines on one side and into the thicket of undergrowth on the other.

Far from him as she was, Marise could hear, through the forest hush, the terrible sound of his breathing as he ran, as he stumbled, as he struggled to his feet, fighting crazily with the thick undergrowth.

Those loud hoa.r.s.e gasps ... it was as though he were being choked to death by a hand on his throat.

He was gone, down the slope towards the valley road. The leaves closed together behind him. The forest was impenetrably silent again. Marise knew who he was, then, recognized him for 'Gene Powers beyond any doubt.

She felt a strange mixture of pity and scorn and envy. To be so primitive as that ... to think, even for an instant's madness, that you could run away on your own two poor human feet from whatever life brought to you!

She herself was hurrying forward again. What was she going to? What had she left behind? The pa.s.sage of the other runner had not taken a single moment's time. She was now at the path which led to Cousin Hetty's side-door.

She darted along this, and found herself in the yard before the door, open as Agnes had left it when she rushed out for help.

A tea-kettle on the kitchen-stove sang in a low murmur. The clock ticked loudly, wagging its pendulum back and forth. The cat, stretched at full length on the floor in a yellow square of sunlight, lifted a drowsy head and looked at her. There was a smell of freshly made coffee in the air.

As she stood there for an instant till the whirling in her head should stop, a stick of wood in the fire broke and fell together.

Marise went through into the dining-room where the table laid for breakfast stood in a quiet expectancy. The old house, well-kept and well-loved, wore a tranquil expression of permanence and security.

But out in the dusky hail, the white stairs stood palely motioning up.

There Marise felt a singular heavy coolness in the stagnant air. She went up the stairs, leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, and found herself facing an open door.

Beyond it, in a shuttered and shaded room, stood a still white bed. And on the bed, still and white and distant, lay something dead. It was not Cousin Hetty. That austere, cold face, proud and stern, was not Cousin Hetty's. It was her grandmother's, her father's, her uncle's face, whom Cousin Hetty had never at all resembled. It was the family sh.e.l.l which Cousin Hetty had for a time inhabited.

Marise came forward and crossed the threshold. Immediately she was aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. The room was densely filled with silence, which folded her about coldly. She sank down on a chair. She sat motionless, looking at what lay there so quiet, at the unimaginable emptiness and remoteness of that human countenance.

This was the end. She had come to the end of her running and her haste and her effort to help. All the paltry agitations and sorrows, the strains and defeats and poor joys, they were all hurrying forward to meet this end.

All the scruples, and sacrifices, and tearing asunder of human desires to make them fit words that were called ideals, all amounted to this same nothingness in the end.

What was Cousin Hetty's life now, with its tiny inhibitions, its little pa.s.sivities? The same nothingness it would have been, had she grasped boldly at life's realities and taken whatever she wanted.

And all Cousin Hetty's mother's sacrifices for her, her mother's hopes for her, the slow transfusion of her mother's life to hers; that was all dead now, had been of no avail against this nothingness. Some day Elly would lie like that, and all that she had done for Elly, or could do for her, would be only a pinch of ashes. If she, if Cousin Hetty, if Cousin Hetty's mother, if Elly, if all of them, took hotly whatever the hours had to give, they could not more certainly be brought to nothingness and oblivion in the end... .

Those dreams of her ... being one with a great current, sweeping forward ... what pitiful delusions! ... There was nothing that swept forward.

There were only futile storms of froth and excitement that whirled you about to no end, one after another. One died down and left you becalmed and stagnant, and another rose. And that would die down in its turn.

Until at the end, s.h.i.+pwreck, and a sinking to this darkly silent abyss.

CHAPTER XX

A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE

July 21. Evening.

Cousin Hetty lay coldly dead; and Marise felt herself blown upon by an icy breath that froze her numb. The doctor had come and gone, queerly, and bustlingly alive and full of talk and explanations; Agnes had come back and, silently weeping, had walked endlessly and aimlessly around the house, with a broom in her idle hand; one after another of the neighbors had come and gone, queerly alive as usual, they too, for all their hushed and awkward manners; Neale had come, seeming to feel that cold breath as little as the others.

And now Neale was gone, after everything had been decided, all the incredibly mult.i.tudinous details that must be decided. The funeral was set for the day after tomorrow, and until then, everything in everybody's life was to stop stock-still, as a matter of course. Because Agnes was in terror of being left alone for an instant, Marise would not even leave the house until after the funeral, and one of the thousand petty unescapable details she and Neale had talked of in the hushed voice which the house imposed on all in it, was the decision as to which dress and hat were to be sent to her from the wardrobe at home.

She was to stay there with Agnes, she, who was all the family old Cousin Hetty had left, for the last watch over what lay up there on the bed in her bedroom. Neale would look out for the children (there was no one else for the moment, Toucle was gone, Eugenia quite useless), would telegraph the few old friends who would care to know the news, would see Mr. Bayweather about the funeral, would telephone the man in West Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs waiting in case the undertaker needed something.

She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr.

Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure himself, hushed and stilled by his a.s.sociation with everlasting stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent. A strange life he must have had. She had never thought of it till she had seen him come into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed, not knowing what to do. Into how many such houses he must have gone, with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody knew was coming sometime and n.o.body ever expected to come at all. How extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old as she was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up. That threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it always comes as a shock," that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would happen to you.

This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person disappeared for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself now, the little girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put her back in the path. She had a moment of very simple, sweet sorrow, sitting there alone in the hall, warm tears streaming down her cheeks and falling on her hands. Cousin Hetty gone, dear old Cousin Hetty, with her bright living eyes, and her love for all that was young. How much she owed her ...

those troubled years of her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house were unfailing shelter. What shelter had she now?

The pendulum of her mind swung back ... of course this was silly traditional repeating of superst.i.tious old words. There was no shelter; there could be none in this life. No one could show her the path, because there _was_ no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was only a charlatan who traded on moments of weakness like this.

Mr. Hadley opened the door quietly and asked in that seldom-heard voice of his for a couple of soft, clean towels. Where did Cousin Hetty keep her towels? In the chest of drawers at the end of the hall. An odor of cloves came up spicily into the air as Marise opened the drawer. How like Cousin Hetty to have that instead of the faded, sentimental lavender. She had perhaps put those towels away there last night, with her busy, shaking old hands, so still now. All dead, the quaintness, the vitality, the zest in life, the new love for little Elly, all dead now, as though it had never been, availing nothing. There was nothing that did not die.

She handed in the towels and sat down again on the stairs leaning her head against the wall. What time could it be? Was it still daylight? ...

No, there was a lamp lighted down there. What could she have been doing all day, she and Agnes and the doctor and Mr. Hadley? She wondered if the children were all right, and if Neale would remember, when he washed Mark's face, that there was a bruise on his temple where the swing-board had struck him. Was that only yesterday morning! Was it possible that it was only last night that she had lain awake in the darkness, trying to think, trying to know what she was feeling, burning with excitement, as one by one those boldly forward-thrusting movements came back to her from the time when he had cried out so angrily, "_They_ can't love her.

They're not capable of it!" to the time when they had exchanged that long reckless gaze over Elly's head! And now there was the triumphant glory of security which had been in his kiss ... why, that was this morning, only a few hours ago! Even through her cold numbed la.s.situde she shrank again before the flare-up of that excitement, and burned in it. She tried to put this behind her at once, to wait, like all the rest, till this truce should be over, and she should once more be back in that melee of agitation the thought of which turned her sick with confusion. She was not strong enough for life, if this was what it brought, these fierce, clawing pa.s.sions that did not wait for your bidding to go or come, but left you as though you were dead and then pounced on you like tigers. She had not iron in her either to live ruthlessly, or to stamp out that upward leap of flame which meant the renewal of priceless youth and pa.s.sion. Between these alternatives, she _could_ make no decision, she could not, it would tear her in pieces to do it.

The pendulum swung back again, and all this went out, leaving her mortally tired. Agnes came to the foot of the stairs, a little, withered, stricken old figure, her ap.r.o.n at her eyes. From behind it she murmured humbly, between swallowing hard, that she had made some tea and there was bread and b.u.t.ter ready, and should she boil an egg?

A good and healing pity came into Marise's heart. Poor old Agnes, it was the end of the world for her, of course. And how touching, how tragic, how unjust, the fate of dependents, to turn from one source of commands to another. She ran downstairs on tip-toe and put her arm around the old woman's shoulder. "I haven't said anything yet, Agnes," she told her, "because this has come on us so suddenly. But of course Mr. Crittenden and I will always look out for you. Cousin Hetty ... you were her best friend."

The old woman laid her head down on the other's shoulder and wept aloud.

"I miss her so. I miss her so," she said over and over.

"The thing to do for her," thought Marise, as she patted the thin heaving shoulders, "is to give her something to work at." Aloud she said, "Agnes, we must get the front room downstairs ready. Mr. Hadley wants to have Cousin Hetty brought down there. Before we eat we might as well get the larger pieces of furniture moved out."

Agnes stood up, docilely submitting herself to the command, stopped crying, and went with Marise into the dim old room, in which nothing had been changed since the day, twenty years ago, when the furniture had been put back in place after Cousin Hetty's old mother had lain there, for the last time.

The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was herself again, stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity of being once more under the direction of another. They pulled out the long haircloth sofa, moved the spindle-legged old chairs into the dining-room, and carried out one by one the drawers from the high-boy in the corner. From one of these drawers a yellowed paper fell out. Marise picked it up and glanced at it. It was a letter dated 1851, the blank page of which had been used for a game of Consequences. The foolish incoherencies lay there in the faded ink just as they had been read out, bringing with them the laughter of those people, so long dead now, who had written them down in that pointed, old-fas.h.i.+oned handwriting. Marise stood looking at it while Agnes swept the other room. Cousin Hetty had been ten years old in 1851, just as old as Paul was now. Her mother had probably left something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her little daughter over this trivial game. A ghostly echo of that long-silent laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear. So soon gone. Was it worth while to do it at all? Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those children one tried to keep laughing, and then ...

Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing. People had been coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as though death had made it their own home. Agnes came to the door, Marise looked up and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the second time she had been there. "I come over again," she said, "to bring you some hot biscuit and honey. I knew you wouldn't feel to do much cooking." She added, "I put the biscuits in the oven as I come through, so they'd keep warm."

"Oh, thank you, Nelly, that's very kind and thoughtful," said Marise. As she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman standing there, the richness of her vitality vibrating about her, she saw again the nightmare vision of 'Gene and heard the terrible breathing that had resounded in the Eagle Rock woods. She was overwhelmed, as so often before in her life, by an amazement at the astounding difference between the aspect of things and what they really were. She had never entirely outgrown the wildness of surprise which this always brought to her. She and Nelly, looking at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot biscuits!

She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech in a play to Agnes' conscientious country attempt to make conversation with the caller, "Hot today, ain't it? Yesterday's storm didn't seem to do much good." And to Nelly's answer on the same note, "Yes, but it's good for the corn to have it hot. 'Gene's been out cultivating his, all day long."